the serfs, and exterminate Jesuits, Jews, and nobles, throughout Podolia,
Volhynia, Red Russia; to desecrate the altars of God, and slay his
servants; to destroy the nobles by lingering tortures; to strip noble
ladies and maidens, and hunt them to death with the whips of his
Cossacks; and after defeating the nobles in battle after battle, to
inaugurate an era of misery and anarchy from which Poland never
recovered.

Thus did the masses of Southern Poland discover, for one generation at
least, that they were not many things, but one thing; a class, capable of
brotherhood and unity, though, alas! only of such as belongs to a pack of
wolves. But such outbursts as this were rare exceptions. In general,
feudalism kept the people divided, and therefore helpless. And as
feudalism died out, and with it the personal self-respect and loyalty
which were engendered by the old relations of master and servant, the
division still remained; and the people, in France especially, became
merely masses, a swarm of incoherent and disorganised things intent on
the necessaries of daily bread, like mites crawling over each other in a
cheese.

Out of this mass were struggling upwards perpetually, all who had a
little ambition, a little scholarship, or a little money, endeavouring to
become members of the middle class by obtaining a Government appointment.
"A man," says M. de Tocqueville, "endowed with some education and small
means, thought it not decorous to die without having been a Government
officer." "Every man, according to his condition," says a contemporary
writer, "wants to be something by command of the king."

It was not merely the "natural vanity" of which M. de Tocqueville accuses
his countrymen, which stirred up in them this eagerness after place; for